You are preparing to deliver the welcome address at your school’s annual day event. You hear a voice calling out your name, inviting you to the stage. The entire auditorium has suddenly gone quiet. As your teacher says, it’s pin-drop silence. You enter the stage and feel hundreds of eyes staring your way. Despite the cool blast of AC, there’s sweat trickling down your neck and your palms feel clammy. You want to speak, but words are slowly flying out of your memory .This is what millions of people dealing with performance anxiety face when they’re asked to perform a task in front of an audience or under time pressure. Noted English actor Alan Rickman, famous for portraying Professor Snape in the Harry Potter movie series, calls it ‘Gremlins in the head’. Talking to researchers Gordon Goodman and James C. Kaufman about how he suffers from performance anxiety, Rickman says: “I get gremlins in my head saying: ‘You’re going to forget your lines.’” What is stage fright?It is an exaggerated feeling of fear and nervousness that comes with performing certain tasks in front of an audience or under time pressure. The anxiety usually peaks moments before the event is set to begin and may last through its entire duration. Symptoms may vary from mild nervousness to nausea and dizziness.Stage fright is a common mental health concern, but it is not a diagnosable condition. So it is often grouped under larger categories of anxiety disorders in scientific and medical literature. The World Health Organization estimates that about 359 million people around the world are living with different types of anxiety disorders.What happens in the brain? The human brain, as it evolved over thousands of years, developed a threat detection mechanism, which helped our ancestors fight or flee from predators and disasters. The amygdala, a region in our brain, controls this mechanism. In the case of some people, the amygdala tends to misinterpret social scrutiny as a threat, says a research study published in 2010 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.This false sense of threat makes the amygdala hyperactive, and the body prepares for a fight-or-flight response. Our heart rate increases, we feel a pounding in the ears, our breathing becomes rapid... We face the audience with the same primal terror our ancestors felt when confronted by a predator.The hyperactive amygdala overloads the brain and impairs cognitive function. This is why we tend to forget the lines of the speech just minutes before delivering it - because the brain is too busy worrying and monitoring for signs of judgment from the audience. Why does this happen?In 2014, psychologists Gordon Goodman and James C. Kaufman published a research paper on stage fright after surveying 151 professional actors. Their list included Emmy award winners and Tony nominees. Based on the findings, they argued that three factors played a crucial role in a person developing stage fright – emotional stability, gender, and locus of control. In psychology, locus of control is the degree to which people believe they have control over their lives. A person who believes that his life is controlled by external factors that he cannot influence has an external locus of control. Whereas a person who believes she can control most events in her life has an internal locus of control. Gordon Goodman and James C. Kaufman argued that female actors with low emotional stability and an external locus of control were at the highest risk of dealing with stage fright. While the study is limited in its scope, and the rate of occurrence may be far broader, it did highlight some important points – being in control of emotions and not worrying too much about what the audience may think can, actually, make us better performers.